Autonomous drone performing a complex 3D trajectoryDevelopment of a software stack based on ROS2 for autonomous drone racing, and deployment on custom quadrotors. The stack implements the pipeline for motion capture-based and vision-based autonomous high-speed flight on complex tracks. It contains modules like EKF, gate detection, VIO drift estimation, trajectory generation, MPC, PID, state predictor, plotting utilities, and a simulator. The custom drone carries an Nvidia Orin NX and it’s designed for high speed and agility (see our paper). All the computation is done onboard and specific optimizations have been made to reduce the latency of the control loop and the sensor readings. The project started with PX4 but moved soon enough to Betaflight.
